


Maker's Gonna Cut You Down

by sinclairsolutions



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Angst, Background Sebastian Vael, Gen, Minor Anders/Hawke (Dragon Age), Post-Dragon Age II, Temporary Character Death, Wakes & Funerals
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-15
Updated: 2020-09-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 20:41:45
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,620
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26485087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sinclairsolutions/pseuds/sinclairsolutions
Summary: It had been a grievous mistake to return to Kirkwall.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 3
Collections: Quiet Life Bingo Fills





	Maker's Gonna Cut You Down

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I need to preface this by saying that I love Anders with my whole heart, it's just that I sometimes show that love by... heaping on the angst. I like to suffer!
> 
> Thanks to Bready for beta-ing this for me!

It had been a grievous mistake to return to Kirkwall. He should have stayed put, barricaded himself in some hovel on the coast of fuck-all nowhere until Hawke returned from Skyhold. He could have lived, then—alone and on the run, a fugitive whose cause had long since outpaced him, but he could have lived. He could have faded into memory, cast aside his name and made himself new, and let the Chantry say what it would about the man he’d once been. It would have been a better end to his story than he probably deserved.

But he was Anders, and inside him was Justice, and between his own impulsivity and the spirit’s self-righteousness, he’d never stood a chance.

His clinic had been set to ruin in the intervening years, but he’d expected that; he hadn’t bothered to find out who precisely had sacked it, and whether it had been done out of necessity or anger. He didn’t suppose he had any place commenting on how the downtrodden took their vengeance, and besides, the place wouldn’t have been safe any longer even if it had been intact. There were too many Templars sniffing around, and Starkhaven soldiers with them, and so when Lirene had offered him a pillow on the floor of her Lowtown hovel, he’d taken it gratefully. She had worn a feather around her neck in place of the old clinic’s lantern, and when someone else had offered him shelter, she’d passed it on to them. Everyone in the undercity knew the signal by now: Look for the raven’s feather, and fly home to its nest for healing.

It wouldn’t be long before the Templars learned it, too.

The child’s breath rattled in her lungs as her coughing fit finally paused, her face contorted with pain, and Anders hushed her gently, drawing up magic in his hand and setting two fingers against her throat. Her eyes went wide at the sudden relief, and she stared at his hand as he withdrew it as if that alone could reveal to her the secrets of the healing he’d done. Anders smiled. He’d delivered her years ago, before everything had gone so desperately wrong, and as dire as the situation was now, he couldn’t help being proud of the bright-eyed, clever girl she’d become. Too clever for her own good—or, more likely, too clever for her mother’s, but that didn’t bother Anders. A sharp wit would be as powerful a weapon as a sword when she grew up… if she ever did. Whatever was in her lungs would kill her young without a healer’s aid.

“Let’s do something about that cough of yours, shall we?” It had been so long since he'd healed children in his clinic, but to his surprise, he slipped back easily into the cheerful reassurance that was required for it. He had always liked the children best; where the adults had been beaten down with worries, most of them impervious to magic, the little ones could still be calmed with a treat or a summoned wisp. With a whisper, he beckoned one from the Fade now, and the child watched enraptured as it danced in the palm of his hand. _Entertain her for a bit_ , he commanded it, and it bobbed obediently in front of her nose. “Come now, just focus on this wisp, and it won’t hurt a bit, I promise.”

The art of spirit healing had always come naturally to Anders, but it had only grown easier once he'd merged with Justice. There was no need to reach into the Fade and beg a spirit for its power; he carried it all within him, and Justice was only too eager to lend his aid. There could be no ambivalence from a spirit who saw suffering through human eyes. Together, they let Anders' magic sink into the child's lungs and reach out, seeking what their power could put right. A complex illness, this one, woven tight until the threads of energy that made up her body were knotted together all wrong, but it was nothing that couldn't be untangled with time.

Time they did not have, apparently.

From the other side of the door, Anders could hear the clang of armor, the thud of soldiers’ boots, and over it, Rhian’s indignant shout: “You’ve no right to barge into my house on the orders of some Starkhaven—”

Whatever she was about to say next was cut off by the rough, booming voice of a soldier. “Where’s the mage?” he barked. “I know you have him!”

“What I have is a child, ser,” Rhian insisted, “whom I’ve spent well over an hour putting down to sleep. Can’t you come back once—”

“So you can let him slip into some back alley the second we turn our backs? Not likely.” There was a short pause, followed by the rattle of chainmail as the soldier gave the order: “Restrain her.” Judging by the sounds of a scuffle, Rhian put up a fight, but it didn’t matter—her struggling quieted soon enough, and then there was no sound but the hollow bang of a shield against wood.

Anders swallowed hard.

“What’s going on?” the girl asked. Her voice wavered, and though Anders couldn’t see her face, he could hear the beginnings of tears catching in her throat.

“Eyes on the wisp, we’re nearly finished,” he said, and then after a pause, he bit his lip and added, “Don’t turn around no matter what, do you understand?” He knew by now what was coming, and it wasn’t fit for the eyes of a child.

“But—”

“It’s all right,” Anders murmured, mostly for the sake of preventing the poor girl from dissolving into hysteria—it was a lie, and neither of them was naïve enough to believe it, but he clung to it like Sebastian had to the words of the Chant. “It’ll all be all right.” The soldier slammed his shield against the door again, and this time it caved under the blow. Anders grimaced, but he didn’t stop. He grabbed at the sickness with his magic and pulled, and with Justice’s aid he felt it give, yes, _there_ —

The spell died on his fingertips as the soldier ran him through. He cried out, his voice and Justice’s intertwined, both of them ragged with the blood in his throat and the indescribable agony of his heart struggling to beat around the cold metal that had pierced it. And then his breath left him, and he felt nothing.

~~~

The little girl screamed as the healer fell, and the sound of it filled Rhian with rage; she struggled in the arms of the soldier who held her, kicking at him desperately until his grip gave way. She rushed forward into the room, past the group of soldiers who had gathered around the body, and took her daughter into her arms. Her shirt was soaked with the healer’s blood, and soon Rhian’s was soaked with her daughter’s tears. “Get out,” she spat, and when one of the soldiers grabbed Anders by the boot and began to drag him across the floor, she grabbed the poker from the fireplace and brandished it in his direction. “ _Alone._ ”

“Prince Vael will want to see the body.”

“Prince Vael can bloody well hang.” Rhian set the child down on her bed and insinuated herself between the soldier and Anders, crouching down beside him with her makeshift weapon and covering his body with hers. “He’s dead. The prince has his vengeance. We’ll burn him proper, and that’ll be our justice for having him taken away. For all the people we’ll lose now that he’s dead.”

She glared up at the soldier, and he glared back; for a long moment, they remained that way, until the soldier blinked first. He wrinkled his nose, as if a staring match with a Lowtown peasant was beneath him, but he called off the other soldiers with a wave of his hand. “It’s on your head if Starkhaven isn’t pleased, woman,” he called over his shoulder. Rhian could not have cared less.

Only once the soldiers had slammed the door behind them did the little girl dare move. “Mama, the healer…” Her voice was hesitant, shaky, as though she had questions but couldn’t find the words for them. Rhian didn’t blame her—she didn’t have words for the answers, either.

“Come here, love,” she said, and embraced the child, squeezing her tightly as if the force of it would drive away the images of what she’d seen. What they’d both seen—Oh, Maker, Rhian had seen her share of death, but she had never seen a man stabbed in the back while he healed a child _._ At least the rattle in her daughter’s chest was gone, but Anders would find no solace in that. 

He lay on the floor where the soldiers had left him, his limbs splayed and his hair fanned out around him like Andraste’s golden crown. His lips were parted in a silent gasp, the last breath he had drawn before it had been stolen from him, and his amber eyes were wide and glassy. She drew them closed with the tips of her fingers. It was too much to look at them—where she expected to find fear in them, there was only sorrow.

He had been ready to die, but he hadn’t wanted to.

~~~

It was a rare thing in Darktown for a man to have his own pyre. There was too little coin for it, and so many dead that if each one was burned alone, there wouldn’t be a scrap of land left to walk over. Those who fell in the undercity were all piled together in whatever rags wouldn’t fetch a copper on the market, their ashes swept out into the ocean and forgotten.

Their healer deserved better than that. Imperfect man that he had been—revolutionary, abomination, murderer, monster—he had also been the only one in the city to give a damn about Darktown. He had set the broken bones of men sentenced to hard labor for crimes he’d never asked after; he had delivered children to mothers abandoned by the Chantry for poverty or whoring or a hundred other things that the Maker might judge them for, but he certainly hadn’t. If they couldn’t give him his life, at least they could give him a bit of dignity in death. 

They would try to give the Champion closure, too, once they figured out what to say.

Rhian was the one to dress him for it. Into the night she worked, by the light of half-burned candles in what remained of the clinic, scrubbing the blood and dirt from his skin and sewing shut the wound the soldiers’ blade had left behind. She lined his eyes with a thin stripe of kohl, as she’d seen him do a few times to catch the Champion’s attention, and powdered the dark circles under them until there was no trace at all of the sleepless nights he’d spent tending to his patients. He seemed twenty years younger this way, but Rhian wondered if he’d ever actually been so relaxed in his life. As long as she’d known Anders, there’d been worry and the echoes of nightmares creased over his brow. She wondered if he was free of it now, if he’d found peace in the arms of the Maker.

She hoped he had, but she doubted it. She doubted he would have recognized peace even if he’d found it.

White linen was rare outside of Hightown—what they had on offer was usually long since stained with sweat and grime—but Lirene had scraped enough silver for a proper funeral tunic. Rhian eased him into it, and then, though it wasn’t the custom, she slid his coat on over it, pauldrons and criss-crossed belts and all. Perhaps she should have been tempted to sell his boots, sturdy as they were, and still in remarkably good shape. But they were also one of the few things the poor man had ever owned, and it felt wrong to rob him of them, even when he had no use for them.

It felt wrong to burn him, too, but there wasn’t much that could be done about that now. Tomorrow, they would light his pyre, for there was nothing else to do with a dead man’s empty shell but keep the Fade’s wandering spirits out of it. But for tonight, he would lie still, as if asleep, in the silence of the ruins that had once been his home.

It was in that silence that Anders drew his first heaving breath. 

His chest throbbed as he hauled himself up, and the pounding in his head was so intense that he almost upended the cot. He only barely managed to catch himself from falling as he threw his head over the side and retched, the sound of his coughing so loud that it almost drowned out the familiar voice in his head: _Steady yourself, mage. Your body is not yet healed._

“Where am I?” Anders’ vision hadn’t fully returned, and he groped around blindly for the dark shapes that swam in front of his eyes. Splintered wood, covered in dirt and dust. Packed dirt, strangely familiar, beneath his palms as he stumbled and caught himself on his hands. “Is this the Fade?”

 _It is Kirkwall,_ Justice replied, and the sound of it reverberated so loudly that Anders grimaced and held his hands over his ears, as if that would stifle the words coming from inside him. _See for yourself._ Little by little, Anders’ vision settled into focus, and once he had blinked away the last of the haze, he realized why his surroundings had seemed so familiar.

“My clinic,” he breathed, his disbelief harsh and raspy in his voice. “But the soldier—he, he killed me, I felt myself dying, I—Justice, am I—”

_You yet live, Anders. Your death would have been unjust._

It was not the entire truth, and Anders could feel it—Justice should have learned by now that it was impossible to keep secrets from someone who shared his mind. But that didn’t matter. What did anything matter, when he had just five minutes ago been dead, and now—

“I’m alive.” The words were a soft benediction, whispered against the muck of the undercity, and he didn’t care that it reeked of dirt and ash and piss. He was almost giddy to smell it—it meant he was alive to do so, and he would be alive to stand up and wipe himself clean of it. Maker, he would be alive to see Hawke again. The thought alone was enough to make him sob for joy.

Justice must have felt it, too; Anders could feel the fondness in his voice. _You are,_ he said, _and you would have a better chance of staying that way if you left._

“Is that a suggestion?” Anders asked shakily as he finally picked himself up off the ground.

_You know it is not. And I know what you would say to me if it was._

Anders knew it, too. He would agree wholeheartedly in the interest of not experiencing death for a third time, and then he’d flee into the night, and he’d make it halfway to Nevarra before he realized he had to turn around. He never seemed to get any better at running away, no matter how many times he did it. So he put aside whatever modicum of self-preservation he had and did the only thing that was left: he lit the clinic’s lantern with a flick of his wrist and waited for whoever would need him.


End file.
